The new attempt for a Doha agreement is the most concrete result of the WTO’s Seventh Ministerial Conference, which concluded on Wednesday with “no surprises,” as planned.

A sense of déjà vu is forgivable. WTO members had previously vowed to conclude the talks by the end of 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2008. Most of these years were marked by informal or formal deadlines for framework agreements on agriculture and industrial goods trade. All were pushed back — and ultimately missed.

Nevertheless, senior officials are scheduled to meet in Geneva later this month to chart a course forward for the negotiations in the new year.

But even as the struggling Doha talks continued preoccupy negotiators, a group of developing countries showed that they were ready to liberalise trade on their own terms. After an early-morning meeting on Wednesday, representatives from a group of 22 developing nations announced that they had agreed a framework deal to cut tariffs and other barriers to each others’ exports, in an attempt to boost South-South trade at a time when multilateral liberalisation efforts are languishing.

Once more, with feeling

“Ministers reaffirmed the need to conclude the round in 2010 and for a stocktaking exercise to take place in the first quarter of next year,” said the conference chair, Chilean Finance Minister Andrés Velasco, in his summary of the three days of discussions. He reported “strong convergence on the importance of trade and the Doha Round to economic recovery and poverty alleviation in developing countries.”

It is unclear what this stocktaking exercise would look like, what it would try to accomplish, or whether ministers would be involved. It could conceivably be anything from a full-fledged attempt for deals on ‘modalities’ — formulae and figures for tariff and subsidy cuts, a prerequisite for a full Doha deal — to a lower-key examination of the state of the talks, to quiet recognition that the end-2010 target is unachievable.

WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy said that this stocktaking would be necessary to measure whether concluding the round in 2010 “is doable or not.” Lamy said that some sort of “breakthrough” would be necessary by the “end of the first quarter” for the negotiations to be wrapped up by the end of the year.

Earlier in the day, EU Agriculture Commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel had called for members to conclude framework ‘modalities’ deals within the first quarter of next year.

The United States has been taking much of the flak for the lack of movement in the Doha talks, as some developing countries are accusing the world’s largest economy of asking too much and offering too little. In a press conference on Wednesday evening, US Trade Representative Ron Kirk continued to hammer away at the need for emerging economies to deliver more market access in the talks.

He also expressed scepticism about the process countries are contemplating for moving the talks along. Although Velasco had discerned widespread support among members for resuming serious negotiations on the basis of the draft texts prepared by the chairs of the agriculture and industrial goods negotiations in December 2008, the US trade chief told a journalist “the texts are called drafts for a reason — they haven’t been accepted yet.”

Kirk questioned why a negotiating process that had ended in failure three years in a row would succeed this time. “The worst thing we can do is convene a meeting for the sake of convening one” as in July 2008, and in the years before, he said.

He argued that the way forward was “tough, sustained bilateral negotiations” to augment what had been accomplished thus far, with a key goal to clarify exactly what the US stood to gain in terms of access to large developing country markets.

Washington’s stance in these bilaterals, however, has left some of its trading partners frustrated. Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorim was disappointed after his bilateral session with his US counterpart on Sunday night, according to an informed source. The US delegation reportedly came to the meeting with a list of 3,000 agricultural and industrial products on which they would like to gain greater market access. But such a long list of demands means ‘everything and nothing’, the Brazilians said, and offers no real clarification of what Washington really wants to gain from a global trade deal. Amorim reportedly complained that Kirk is just engaging in ’shadow theatre’ — pretending to play along, but ultimately delivering nothing of substance.

Other ministers were more forgiving. Indian Commerce Minister Anand Sharma told a press conference on Wednesday afternoon that he had had “very constructive, very useful engagement with Kirk and his delegation.”

Two decisions taken: ‘TRIPS non-violation’ and e-commerce

Ministers took only two concrete decisions over the course of the three-day meeting, but even the wording of those arcane agreements had been set out clearly by Geneva-based delegates well before their bosses arrived in Geneva. 

The first issue, ‘non-violation complaints’ under the WTO’s Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, concerns whether countries should be allowed to bring WTO disputes on the grounds that the spirit, but not the letter, of WTO intellectual property (IP) rules has been violated. The WTO allows such complaints for trade in goods and services, but there has been a ban on IP-related cases since the organisation’s founding in 1995. The prohibition was meant to last five years, but it has been extended at ministerial conferences ever since. Ministers agreed on Wednesday to extend the moratorium once again and to revisit the matter at the WTO’s next ministerial meeting, which is planned for 2011. Until then, they agreed not to file any such suits under TRIPS. 

In their second official decision, ministers agreed to extend another moratorium, this one on tariffs on goods such as songs or movies that are sold for download on the internet. A ban on such tariffs has been in place since the WTO’s second Ministerial Conference in 1998, when WTO members agreed to refrain from “imposing customs duties on electronic transmissions.” Ministers agreed on Wednesday to draw out that ban again, at least until the 2011 ministerial.

22 countries strike ‘South-South’ trade deal

In a move significant for reasons political as much as economic, 22 developing nations approved a framework deal on Wednesday to cut tariffs by a fifth or more on a substantial majority of each others’ exports.

Jorge Taiana, Argentina’s minister of foreign affairs and international trade, pointed to the contrast with the Doha Round negotiations, in which WTO members have been unable to agree on tariff and subsidy cuts. “Maybe it shows that the problem in trade liberalisation and trade negotiation is not in developing countries,” he told a press conference where the deal was announced. “It shows that developing countries have the will and the capability to reach an agreement.”

“The North is stalling, but the South is moving,” said Brazil’s foreign minister, Celso Amorim.

Wednesday’s decision established the ministers’ agreement on the framework for a new round of tariff cuts under the Global System of Trade Preferences among Developing Countries (GSTP), a South-South trade scheme negotiated under the auspices of the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). The ‘modalities’ of the deal — the parameters determining how many tariffs would be cut, and by how much — were hammered out by negotiators last week, following intensive talks at UNCTAD’s Geneva headquarters.

In addition to Argentina and Brazil, signatories include Egypt, India, Indonesia, Morocco, and Mexico, both North and South Korea, and some countries still trying to accede to the WTO, like Algeria and Iran. The GSTP, which entered into force in 1989, has 43 members. Only 22 of them participated in the just-concluded negotiations, which started in Sao Paulo in 2004. China and South Africa are not part of the GSTP, and thus have not been participating in the talks.

With the framework in place, each participating country will now begin drawing up a list of products that will face extra tariff cuts. Those lists must account for at least 70 percent of each country’s total number of agricultural and industrial tariff lines that are not already bound at zero. While approving each other’s lists, countries will have the chance to seek additional tariff concessions through a ‘request-offer’ process. Least-developed countries wishing to join the agreement would be eligible for special and differential treatment, possibly in the form of a greater margin of preference. Argentina’s Taiana indicated that the group hoped to conclude these negotiations by September 2010.

Crucially, tariff cuts negotiated under the GSTP will not be extended to other countries. What this means in practice is that India could end up levying a 10 percent duty on car parts imported from the US, while identical parts from Brazil face a tariff of 8 percent or less. This departure from the WTO’s non-discrimination principles is sanctioned by the Enabling Clause of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which authorises such preferential trade arrangements among developing and least-developed countries.

Opening up trade among developing countries could help spur recovery from the global economic crisis, ministers said on Wednesday, particularly given the lack of agreement on liberalisation at the multilateral level. “We in the South are not waiting for solutions to come from heaven,” said Hisham Badr, Egypt’s ambassador to the WTO, “but sometimes the solutions can come from the South.”

In the Doha Round negotiations, the US and the EU have argued that large developing countries are cashing in on trade, and that they should therefore allow other developing countries even greater market access for both farm products and industrial goods. The GSTP expansion lets participants expand South-South trade, albeit among a subset of countries, without opening their markets to the industrialised world

By UNCTAD’s own account, the two previous rounds of GSTP negotiations have not had “far-reaching results.” The UN trade body estimates that the tariff cuts agreed to could boost trade among participating countries by more than US$8 billion. But this would still be under a tenth of the most modest projections for the gains from a Doha deal to cut tariffs and subsidies.

Other initiatives for South-South cooperation went ahead on the sidelines of the ministerial, including a meeting among India, Brazil, and South Africa, as well as India, Mercosur, and the Southern African Customs Union.

ACP countries unhappy with pending bananas deal

At press time, considerable confusion reigned over what exactly had been agreed on the EU’s banana tariff (see Tuesday’s Bridges Daily Update, http://ictsd.org/i/trade-and-sustainable-development-agenda/63450/). EU Agriculture Commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel told the press that the EU, Latin American producer countries, and the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) group had reached an agreement, and that US Trade Representative Ron Kirk had offered his support. She added that she had every confidence that the European Commission would finalise a draft legal text this week.

ACP countries offered a different version of the state of play. Cameroon’s Trade Minister Luc Magloire Mbarga Atangana stated forcefully that “despite rumours, [ACP trade ministers] say there is no agreement yet, we have seen no agreement and do not know its contents.” He said that two issues in particular were still outstanding: the size of the financial envelope the EU would offer to help ACP banana producers to adjust or diversify (€190 million offered, €250 million requested), and the ‘legal basis’ for the tariff cut itself. A stand-alone agreement, such as the one the EU claims to have concluded, would not be legitimate, he said. Instead, the size of the cut and the length of its implementation period should be determined within the Doha Round negotiations.

Parting thoughts

Views seemed to vary on whether the ministerial summit had been worth the effort and cost, with a number of delegates saying that it had at the very least provided an occasion for useful informal and bilateral exchanges.

One senior trade diplomat said that the world economy had changed since the last time ministers from all WTO members met, four years ago. The meeting gave ministers a chance to examine the WTO’s functioning in the context of the economic changes, and discuss how the institution could be adapated to the new reality.

Another official, also speaking under condition of anonymity, was less convinced. “Only if we have some sort of stocktaking in 2010″ would the ministerial prove to be a worthwhile exercise, the official said. Otherwise, “perhaps this was much ado about nothing.”

“The mountain has trembled, and delivered a small rat.”

On the sidelines of the conference, however, prospects improved for a deal to end the trading system’s long-running dispute over bananas. Sources report that after intensive talks between the concerned countries, an agreement may be possible by Friday.

Meanwhile, another source of tension in global trade relations may be headed to dispute settlement, as ministers from four West African cotton producing countries raised the possibility of launching a WTO case against the US if Washington fails to cut its lavish cotton subsidies.

The official plenary ran on in the background — a succession of ministers making three-to-five minute statements to a mostly empty conference room.

Four topics for working session

WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy, who started his day with a 6am jog by the lake with some of the more intrepid visiting ministers, opened the working session by urging delegates to devote their attentions to four issues: the struggling Doha Round talks, regional trade agreements, aid for trade funding amidst the economic downturn, and accession.

In particular, he pointed to the need for coherence between what countries agree to in regional trade deals and what they negotiate at the multilateral level. The Frenchman also asked members to think about how they could speed up or otherwise facilitate the accession process. It now takes years — in a few cases, decades — for countries to negotiate their way into the WTO.

Of the dozens of members and observers that intervened, many called for guidance in the coming weeks about how the talks would unfold in early 2010. A meeting of senior officials scheduled for later in the month is likely to discuss how to proceed in the new year.

Some said that the pace of negotiations would have to pick up if the Doha Round is indeed to be concluded in 2010, a target now being bandied about by the majority of WTO members. Any serious attempt to finalise an accord by then will be complicated by US congressional elections in November, since Washington may be more reluctant to clinch potentially controversial trade deals when voters are headed to the polls.

One senior trade official told Bridges that for the talks to have a chance of concluding by the end of 2010, Members need to send some sort of “signal” by April that they are serious about doing so. The source said that Washington’s failure to offer new concessions in the Doha Round talks was enabling other countries to “hide,” and avoid pressure to offer new moves of their own.

During the working session, the African Group stressed that development should remain the main focus of the round, and that efforts should be directed at closing the gaps in the December 2008 negotiating texts.

Egypt, among others, called for reforms to the WTO’s accession procedures, saying that whether a country is allowed to join the global trade body should be based on objective technical and economic criteria, rather than political considerations. WTO rules allow existing members a de facto veto on the admission of new countries. They also require acceding countries to negotiate bilateral market-opening agreements with any members who want them. The demands of these agreements have grown more stringent in the past decade, prompting complaints of unfairness and criticism of the developmental impact of the accession process.

Divergence on deal on environmental goods

In his remarks to the working session, US Trade Representative Ron Kirk said “we fully support fast-tracking action in the WTO’s work on liberalising trade in climate-friendly technologies.”

The US is one of several countries that have also been exploring the possibility of striking an agreement to liberalise trade in ‘green’ goods and services outside the framework of the Doha Round talks. WTO members have struck stand-alone, sector-specific liberalisation deals in the past, notably on information technology goods.

Many countries — Australia, Japan, New Zealand, Qatar and the United States among them — say that removing or eliminating tariffs on environmental goods could help countries combat climate change, by lowering the cost of key technologies.

But some significant players, namely Brazil and India, are not particularly enthusiastic about the EGS deal that has been promoted by the US and the EU. Brazil has argued that it would discriminate unfairly in favour of certain rich-country exports. A truly climate-friendly liberalisation package should include ethanol, Brasilia says, which is heavily protected and subsidised in both the US and the EU.

Brazil, which produces its ethanol from sugarcane, is widely considered to have the most efficient and sustainable biofuels industry in the world. Most American ethanol — it is the world’s second largest producer, after Brazil — is derived from corn, a far more resource-intensive source.

In a meeting with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton last week, Brazilian foreign minister Celso Amorim laid out Brazil’s requirements: any EGS deal would have to include goods, namely ethanol, that are of export interest to South America’s largest economy.

Indonesia, for one, has already decided to lower its duties on clean technology products. Speaking at a parallel ICTSD symposium on Tuesday morning, Indonesia’s trade minister, Mari Pangestu, stressed that tariff cuts should be accompanied by reductions in non-tariff barriers and cumbersome import regulations, as well as more openness to foreign investment.

At the same symposium, a separate issue related to trade and climate change policy, namely ‘border carbon adjustments’ also figured prominently in the discussion. Jake Colvin of the US Foreign Trade Council stressed that such measures — whether a tariff or an obligation for importers to purchase carbon credits — were widely considered necessary to win congressional approval of the climate bill now under consideration in the US Senate.

But Indian Commerce Minister Anand Sharma warned of the potential dangers of such measures to the ministerial conference’s opening plenary on Monday. “Protectionism is a global bad, and yet some persevere in working on ideas of ‘green protectionism’,” he said. “This is a dangerous trend and will only create fresh tensions in global trade.”

Banana deal imminent?

On the sidelines of the conference, European and Latin American trade negotiators held intense negotiations on the EU’s banana tariff, the subject of trading system’s longest-running dispute.

The two sides are reportedly close to agreement on a deal whereby the EU would cut its current most-favoured-nation tariff from €176 per tonne to €148. Over the next seven years, the tariff would be further reduced to €114 per tonne. In exchange, Latin American producers are to drop all outstanding WTO litigation on the matter. The accord is broadly similar to the one the EU conditionally offered in July 2008, but withdrew when the wider talks collapsed.

Banana-producing countries in the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) group of states, which have limitless duty-free access to the EU’s banana market, are believed to be considering whether to accept the deal. However, details on EU financing for their restructuring and adjustment efforts were still pending at press time. Apparently, the EU has offered from €190 to €200 million, while ACP countries are still holding out for €250 million.

The banana agreement is part of a broader equation between the erosion of long-standing trade preferences and the Doha Round mandate for the fullest liberalisation of tropical products. The problem is that many of the most traded tropical products are among those for which a number of developing countries have preferential market access. The discussions are centred on which products should be considered ‘tropical’ and therefore slated for faster and steeper liberalisation, and another list comprising products affected by preference erosion, on which tariffs will be cut more modestly and more gradually so as to give the recipient countries more time to adjust. The main products in question are rum, tobacco, cut flowers, arrowroot, palm oil, groundnut oil, coffee and melons. While delegates have reportedly agreed on the tariff cuts that products should undertake, negotiations continue on the implementation period of these cuts for four products — sugar, rum, tobacco and cut flowers.

According to some sources, the classification of only four products — sugar, rum, tobacco and cut flowers — is still undecided.

The EU is hoping to conclude the banana deal by the end of the week so that a notification of its changed tariff schedule can be made to General Council ahead of its next scheduled meeting,on 17 December. That would open a 90-day period, during which trading partners are allowed to present objections to the proposed revision.

Tariff reductions will begin when the Lisbon Treaty enters into force, i.e. after it has been approved by the member states and the European Parliament. Brussels has agreed to reimburse all duties levied from the moment a bananas deal takes effect.

Guatemala is reportedly trying to obtain more market access for rum, while Colombia seeks further market access concessions on sugar. India is reportedly keen to get specific tariff lines for the following products products included in an eventual tropical product deal: cut flowers, fresh chilled vegetable, rice, beef, cigars, tobacco, fruit and nuts, certain vegetable preparations, sugar, mangoes, other fruits.

On the other hand, ACP countries consider say that the EU went well beyond what was required on preference erosion. For the Caribbean, three products are particularly important: bananas, sugar and rum. As one commentator put it, the whole package is changing at the margins, ‘in search of a new equilibrium’.

Cotton Four Speaks Up

Since 2003, cotton subsidies have featured prominently in the Doha Round negotiations, with a group of four West African countries saying that their farm receipts and export revenues have been hit hard by the effects of the US’s lavish payments to its politically influential cotton farmers. WTO members have agreed in principle to special subsidy and tariff cuts for cotton as part of a Doha Round agriculture agreement.

But a Doha agreement remains distant, and the US has not reformed its cotton subsidy practices, ministers from Burkina Faso, Mali, Benin, and Chad told journalists on Tuesday.

Mamadou Sanou, Burkina Faso’s trade minister, raised the possibility of taking Washington to dispute settlement at the WTO if it did not change its policies. “We will not be able to wait eternally,” he said, warning that the cotton sector was in danger of “disappearance.”

It is not the first time that the ‘Cotton Four’ have threatened legal action. Brazil has already won a WTO dispute against US cotton subsidies.

Ahmadou Abdoulaye Diallo, Mali’s trade and industry minister, stressed that they would prefer to avoid a dispute. “[WTO dispute settlement] is our nuclear button,” he said. “We have it, but we don’t want to use it.”

But there are no signs that the divisions that have bedevilled the talks for most of their eight years are abating.

This quickly became apparent during the opening plenary Monday afternoon.

“We have made our specific interests well known: that meaningful market opening is required to complete the round,” said US Trade Representative Ron Kirk, who was one of the first speakers. He strongly implied that much of this market opening needed to come from “key emerging markets,” in barely veiled references to countries like Brazil, China, and India.

Minutes later, Celso Amorim, Brazil’s foreign minister, countered that emerging economies had already put considerable market access on the table. “It is unreasonable to expect that concluding the round would involve additional unilateral concessions from developing countries,” he said.

“Demands for additional market access in developing countries need to be tempered by the development mandate, not mercantilist aspirations,” echoed Indian Commerce Minister Anand Sharma, further highlighting the divide.

The G-10 bloc of mostly developed countries with heavily protected farm sectors was also not enamoured of Washington’s call for market access, this time on agriculture. The group, which includes Switzerland, Norway, and Korea, complained on Monday about increasingly ambitious demands in agriculture from the US and others, while talks on services and industrial market access lag behind.

Earlier, WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy appealed to members to send a strong signal of unity and determination to conclude the round by 2010. “Political leaders are practically unanimous that they want to meet” the target, he said, “but reaffirmation is not enough. Now we need action, concrete and practical action, to close the remaining gaps.”

Catherine Ashton, speaking on her final day as EU trade commissioner, expressed concern that “we’re progressing too slowly for the 2010 objective.”

Hints about future process?

Differences on substance notwithstanding, several countries have started to outline a potential process for concluding the round in 2010.

The G-20 developing-country coalition had already agreed on Sunday that there should be a “multilateral opportunity, early next year” to drive progress. The Cairns Group of efficient farm exporters said on Monday morning that a framework deal on agriculture should be struck by early next year, with ministers gathering “in the early part of 2010…to ensure the round is on track for conclusion.” Ministers’ participation would make it easier to resolve differences, trade diplomats believe.

Swiss Trade Minister Doris Leuthard, too, suggested that the director-general consider convening a “stocktaking exercise early next year” to ensure that trade officials are on track to meet their end-2010 Doha goal.

Lamy told a public meeting Monday morning that if members do indeed want to conclude the round in 2010, “we will need an acceleration” in the negotiating process. “How we organise this acceleration” would be the top item on the WTO’s post-ministerial agenda, he said.

US trade envoy Kirk cautioned that process was not enough to yield convergence. “Success is not something that negotiating group chairs, or our esteemed director-general, can deliver for us,” he told the plenary. “[While w]ork programmes and stocktakings [are] useful, we cannot confuse process and substance. All shortcuts will only lead to further delays and dead ends. There simply is no substitute for the hard work of negotiations in all formats among members - ranging from large groups to direct bilateral engagement.”

Countries continue to jockey for moral high ground in the negotiations. Amorim announced in his plenary speech that by mid-2010, Brazil would grant duty- and quota-free access to exports from least-developed countries covering 80 percent of all tariff lines. Four years later, all goods would be covered. “We can only hope that the developed countries will follow suit,” he said, in a not-so-subtle jibe at the US, which continues to levy tariffs on some LDC exports.

Institutional thinking: reform, renewal

Not all of the ministers who spoke to the plenary on Monday focused on the Doha Round negotiations.

Switzerland’s Leuthard noted that the WTO’s preoccupation with the trade talks carried risks. “The ordinary committees do not always receive the necessary attention from members,” she said, in a reference to the permanent WTO bodies unrelated to Doha in which countries can discuss a range of trade irritants. “This is contributing to the perception by the outside world that the WTO is losing its relevance, which is a big danger for WTO.”

Amorim, too, warned that the global trade body could be marginalised unless governments took action. “The WTO is a valuable asset,” he said, “but it can lose relevance unless Members are prepared to invest the political capital required to equip it for the agenda of the 21st Century, an agenda that will inevitably be linked to sustainable development in all its dimensions.”

Both Leuthard and Indian minister Sharma referred to a proposal to create a process to review the WTO’s functioning, efficiency and transparency and to consider improvements to the system where appropriate. Despite wide support, that proposal, which was co-sponsored by 16 other countries, will not be put to ministers for a decision this week, for want of consensus.

Ministers from Malaysia, Mexico, China, and Hong Kong, among others, also stressed the need for members to consider how the organisation can be made more effective.

Institutional reform was on the agenda Monday morning at a parallel symposium organised by the International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development. (Disclosure: ICTSD is the publisher of Bridges Daily Updates.) Here, Lamy contended that a Doha agreement in itself would be the best way to strengthen the system. The WTO chief argued that the global trading system’s “existing toolbox” of rules and institutions was sufficient to address challenges like climate change and energy. “My own sense, for what it’s worth, is that there is no reform problem in the WTO,” Lamy said.

But other speakers serving on the panel with Lamy demurred, saying that the global trade body could benefit significantly from some internal re-tooling. Mexican Trade Minister Gerardo Ruiz Mateos argued that the WTO must build its capacity “to respond quickly and effectively to protectionist measures” that its members take. Meanwhile, Thomas Cottier, director of the World Trade Institute, called for the creation of “an executive body on the level of ministers,” which could provide guidance and “take some ownership” of the WTO’s work.

‘Jingle Bells’ rings in the halls

While trade officials kept busy with plenaries and side meetings, some members of civil society — who are attending the ministerial in solid, if not record, numbers — strove to make their own mark on the gathering.

Some 435 civil society groups from 61 developed and developing countries are accredited to attend the conference. Lamy briefed a packed room of non-governmental organisation representatives on Monday afternoon.

While most members of civil society have come to observe, or perhaps lobby their governments on the sidelines, some are determined to make a ruckus. A group of protesters barged through the lobby of the packed conference centre on Monday afternoon, just as the ministerial’s first official plenary session was about to get underway. Attracting a crowd of onlookers as they marched through the crowd, the twenty-odd activists belted out a protest song to the tune of ‘Jingle Bells’:

“Doha’s dead, so go away

We’ve had enough of you

Aid for trade is the game you play

It’s empty through and through.”

But the demonstrators were not looking to block any of the meeting’s activities, and the group disbanded quickly after finishing its a cappella protest. A secretariat official confirmed later in the day that the brief outburst “caused no disruptions” in the cavernous hall in which the plenary session was about to start.

Government officials have “very low expectations” for the summit, which will run from 30 November to 2 December at the city’s International Conference Centre.

It is a ‘non-event’ by design. The WTO has been bruised by acrimonious breakdowns in the Doha Round negotiations in each of the past three years. With the organisation’s 153 members still not close to an agreement in the eight-year-old trade talks, it was decided in May that the long-overdue meeting - WTO statutes provide for formal ministerials to be held every two years - would be a ‘housekeeping exercise’, not a negotiating session. Instead of risking another Doha-related collapse, the summit would focus on “the WTO, the Multilateral Trading System and the Current Global Economic Environment.”

What will a non-negotiating meeting entail? Ministers are scheduled to dedicate a one-day working session, on 1 December, to reviewing the gamut of the WTO’s activities, including the Doha negotiations. Another working session, the following day, will deal with ‘the WTO’s contribution to recovery, growth and development’. These sessions will run alongside a plenary, during which senior government representatives will make prepared statements of three minutes.

WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy hopes that ministers will use their interventions to provide guidance for “how they see engagement in the Doha negotiations post-December” and “give a sense of direction for the activities of the WTO for the next years.”

Any such guidance, however, would be purely of the political kind, such as reaffirmations of governments’ desire to conclude the round by the end of 2010, or support for the WTO’s monitoring of countries’ trade policies amid the economic crisis. Members are so determined to avoid contentious exchanges on the nitty-gritty of the Doha agenda that many capital-based senior officials who were in Geneva for meetings last week are going home before the ministers’ summit kicks off.

When the non-Doha ministerial was first announced, many trade experts had hoped that governments would use the meeting to discuss issues that have been largely neglected since the negotiations were launched in 2001, such as ways in which the institution’s functioning could be improved, or newer challenges posed to the multilateral trading system by things like regional trade integration and climate change.

They will be disappointed.

As things stand now, ministers will be asked to take decisions on only two arcane issues: TRIPS ‘non-violation’ complaints and e-commerce. Under the former, members are set to extend until the next Ministerial Conference a moratorium on suing each other over damage arising from alleged violations of the spirit but not the letter of WTO intellectual property rules. They are also set to agree to continue to refrain from levying tariffs on ‘electronic transmissions’ such as books and software downloaded off the internet (see Bridges Weekly, 11 November 2009, http://ictsd.org/i/news/bridgesweekly/59219/). They will also make some procedural decisions, such as when and where to hold the next Ministerial Conference.

But they are almost certain, for example, not to look at a proposal entitled ’strengthening the multilateral trading system’, backed by 18 developed and developing country members, including India, the US, the EU, China, and Brazil (WT/MIN(09)/W/1) and informally supported by the vast majority of the organisation’s membership. The document, which was introduced in October, calls for the Ministerial Conference to set up a “deliberative process to review the WTO’s functioning, efficiency and transparency and consider possible improvements.” But the proposal was dropped from consideration after it received a cool response from Bolivia, Cuba, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. Geneva-based negotiators had an informal agreement that issues to be put to ministers for a decision would have to command consensus approval.

Also for want of consensus, ministers are unlikely to decide on a proposal by the least-developed countries’ group seeking an ‘early harvest’ package that would cover duty- and quota-free market access for LDC exports; a waiver that would allow WTO members to discriminate in favour of LDC services providers; and an ‘ambitious, expeditious and specific’ plan for slashing cotton subsidies.

Sources report that ministers from LDCs are likely to raise these issues in their plenary addresses, as well as in the working sessions. Bangladeshi Commerce Minister Faruk Khan has indicated that he will also urge WTO members to develop rules to prevent countries from banning food exports to LDCs. During the spike in food prices last year, Bangladesh tried but was unable to purchase food on international markets because several food-producing countries had restricted agricultural exports in an attempt to control prices at home.

Only real action to be on sidelines

No negotiators who spoke to Bridges expected much to emerge from the set-piece plenary speeches or even the working sessions scheduled for this week’s conference. One trade diplomat noted that having more than 150 people in a room was not conducive to a back-and forth conversation, adding, only partly in jest, “I can’t imagine a real discussion breaking out.”

The real action, insofar as there is any, will take place in numerous informal meetings among ministers on the margins of the conference.

The nearly 100 ministers who will be in the same place at the same time this week are scheduling a large number of meetings, both bilaterals and various group sessions, in hotels and other venues around Geneva. These gatherings could be used to discuss trade irritants and issues unrelated to the WTO, such as potential free trade agreements. But they could also serve as a forum for a high-level discussion of sticking points in the Doha Round. If the US and China, for instance, were able to bridge some of their differences on market access for industrial goods, the ramifications for the talks could be significant.

No one at the conference will be under greater scrutiny than Ron Kirk, Washington’s top trade official. Several countries are frustrated with the lack of definition of what the US wants other countries to concede in the Doha Round talks, and what it is willing to offer in return.

A representative view came from Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorim on Sunday. “We haven’t been able to hear from the US precisely what it wants,” he complained to journalists. Washington simply “wants more,” which is “bothering” in itself, he added, in light of economic analysis showing that the Doha Round parameters under consideration would already require many developing countries to cut applied tariffs on manufactured goods more deeply than the US.

Yet negotiators harbour little hope that Kirk will do anything this week to drive progress in the Doha talks. US President Barack Obama is bogged down in domestic fights over healthcare reform, climate change policy, and the war in Afghanistan, and has little political capital left to spend on trade, an unpopular topic with several of the groups that helped him win last year’s election. Kirk will not be attending a Tuesday dinner meeting of ministers and ambassadors from a group of ten major players in the negotiations, the US mission to the WTO has reportedly indicated. The dinner, which will be hosted jointly by Australia, Indonesia and the EU, is “the closest thing to a Green Room” that this meeting will see, one delegate told Bridges, adding that “everyone was very disappointed” that the US trade envoy would not attend the gathering.

Nevertheless, most of the WTO’s major issue-based negotiating blocs have scheduled coordination meetings before and during the conference, although these may yield little more than declarations of solidarity and reiterations of each group’s well-established priorities.

Ministers from the Group of 20 developing countries (the Brazil-led bloc with a common stance on many aspects of the Doha round farm trade talks, not to be confused with the G-20 major world economies) met with the coordinators of other developing country groups as well as Pascal Lamy on Sunday. In a communiqué released after the meetings, the G-20 stressed the centrality of agriculture and developmental considerations to the Doha negotiations. They called for a “multilateral opportunity, early next year,” to identify remaining obstacles to concluding the round by the end of 2010.

Also set to meet, at time of writing, were the LDC group and the G-33, the bloc of developing countries sensitive to farm imports. The Cairns Group of farm exporters is scheduled to meet Monday, as is the G-110, which includes almost all of the developing and least-developed countries in the WTO.

Ministers from 22 developing countries will gather on 2 December to approve a framework accord to lower the duties they levy on many of each other’s exports by 20 percent or more, in an effort to boost South-South trade. Some 70 percent of each country’s manufactured and farm products are to be covered by the deal, negotiated under the Global System of Tariff Preferences (see Bridges Weekly, 25 November 2009, http://ictsd.org/i/news/bridgesweekly/62005/).

Activists target WTO role on financial services, food trade

Even though this WTO meeting is less likely than most to result in any changes to global trade rules, a wide range of civil society groups have come to Geneva to protest against the WTO on the sidelines of the conference. The start date of this year’s ministerial — ten years to the day after massive protests disrupted a WTO summit in Seattle — has become a rallying cry for demonstrators. (WTO officials say that the date was a coincidence, the result of an oversight.)

A demonstration organised by some 40 civil society groups had to be called off mid-way Saturday afternoon, when a number of vandals broke out from the procession of 2,000-odd protesters to break shop windows and set fire to cars in central Geneva. More rallies are planned for the three days of the conference, but none are expected to achieve the scale of Saturday’s march.

Our World Is Not For Sale, one of the groups that participated in the protest but did not condone Saturday’s violence, is a coalition of farmers, labour, and social movments. It blames the WTO’s economic model for the financial crisis, the climate crisis, and the food crisis.

“The WTO is the cause of many of the economic, social, and environmental problems we face, not the cure,” said Lori Wallach, head of US consumer advocacy group Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, which is a member of the coalition. “We need global trade rules, but we need to change the rules,” she told journalists Saturday morning.

In the wake of the global financial crisis, WTO services rules have been singled out for particular opprobrium. Some in civil society hold WTO provisions covering trade in financial services responsible for promoting deregulation and impeding governments’ attempts to introduce prudential regulatory rules. WTO officials including Pascal Lamy, as well as other analysts, have countered that multilateral rules afford countries ample room to preserve regulations, pointing to Canada as an example of a fairly liberalised, but well regulated, financial services sector.

An expert commission on international financial reforms convened by the United Nations concluded earlier this year that financial services provisions linked to the General Agreement on Trade in Services could potentially restrict governments’ ability to pursue certain kinds of regulatory reform, or raise the cost of doing so. The commission, chaired by the Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz, also blamed financial market liberalisation for contributing to the rapid spread of the financial crisis around the world.

Even the procedural aspects for this ministerial will be modest. More than eleven years have passed since a WTO Ministerial Conference met but did not aim to launch new negotiations (Seattle and Doha) or push ahead in ongoing talks (Cancun and Hong Kong). But unlike comparable ministerials in Singapore in 1996 or Geneva in 1998, this year’s meeting will not end with a painstakingly negotiated formal declaration. Instead, the chair of the conference, Chilean Trade Minister Andrés Velasco, will issue a ‘balanced and factual’ summary of the discussions — thus eliminating another potential occasion for discord.

Geneva Trade and Development Symposium

A major civil society symposium will provide a forum for substantive discussion just down the road from the ministerial conference centre. Pascal Lamy will start the proceedings on Monday morning, with a speech to the first plenary session of the three-day gathering, which will address issues such as how the multilateral trading system could be strengthened to deal with emerging challenges, and the relationship between climate change policies and industrial competitiveness. The plenaries will be followed by smaller sessions on related topics. (Disclosure: The symposium is organised by the International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development, publisher of the Bridges Daily Update.) For further details, visit http://www.ictsdsymposium.org/.